Stephen Kneale lists ten biblical texts where Jesus, he suggests, is explicitly called ‘God’:
John 1:1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. — John 1:1 (CSB)
John 20:28
Romans 9:5
‘Should you believe in the Trinity?’ asks this JW article.
‘IF PEOPLE were to read the Bible from cover to cover without any preconceived idea of a Trinity, would they arrive at such a concept on their own? Not at all.
‘What comes through very clearly to an impartial reader is that God alone is the Almighty, the Creator, separate and distinct from anyone else, and that Jesus, even in his prehuman existence, is also separate and distinct, a created being, subordinate to God.’
…5:20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us insight to know him who is true, and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. This one is the true God and eternal life.
Is John referring to the Father or to the Son as ‘the true God’?
(a) Some commentators understand John to mean that ‘the true God’ refers to the Father (so Westcott, Dodd, Grayston, Smalley, Stott). …
John 1:1 ‘…and the Word was God’ (NIV)
The New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses translates this verse idiosyncratically: “In the beginning the Word was, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.”
‘Their explanation for this is that in the Greek there is no definite article before ‘God’, whereas if God (theos) were meant in the full and absolute sense it should be ho theos: ‘God’ with the definite article.
…He is
(Adapted from Naismith, 1200 Scripture Outlines, p194)…
Bart Ehrman is one of those scholars who impresses with his extensive knowledge (to say nothing of his personal charm and communication ability), but who makes glaring errors of judgement on too regular a basis. Perhaps it is his own loss of Christian faith that makes him so certain that he has no axe to grind that he cannot see the axes lying all around him – some on have already been ground, others are waiting to be ground, still others are in the process of being ground. …
In his recent book, How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman argues that belief in the divinity of Jesus developed gradually over several centuries, and was not believed or taught by the first apostles.
At the same time that Ehrman’s book was published, a multi-author response also came out. The authors are Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, Simon J. Gathercole, Charles E. Hill, and Chris Tilling, and the title is, How God Became Jesus: The real origins of belief in Jesus’ divine nature: A response to Bart Ehrman.…
‘As a matter of methodology it is a great mistake to confine our response to [an] attack on the deity of Christ to those parts of the New Testament which specifically describe Christ as God. There is no doubt, as we shall see, that the New Testament does very often describe Christ as God. But the proof of His deity is much wider than that. We simply must not allow Jehovah’s Witnesses to limit the debate to the narrow question, Does the Bible call Jesus God?…
